The Importance of Comparison And Contrast in Narrative Organization

Abstract

Visitors to our household in the past couple of years have run the rish of being regaled with corny comic stories told with great gusto by my two children. Two of these stories, transcribed from recent tellings, follow. Although the tonditions of recording (by note pad) produced slower, more cautious, tellings than would have occurred in a spontaneous setting, the stories do not seem to me substantially altered from earlier versions, partly because the children are much practised in their telling. The only important change, tuggested by me, was the loss in each story of the national identity of the characters; this was to avoid perpetuating a subtle form of prejudice, which associates one nationality with stupid or unsociable behavior. Needless to say, though my children were the narrators, they were not the originators of the stories.